Boom Blox Bash Party: sticking to the Wii, and going online

Boom Blox was something of a slow burn, but is now a game that ranks among the …

Boom Blox was a game that didn't roar out of the gates, but enjoyed a long and steady climb to something approaching cult status. If you can consider a game that crosses so many demographic lines "cult." We sat down with senior producer Amir Rahimi to talk about the sales of the first game, and what to expect from the sequel: Boom Blox Bash Party.

Reports of the first game's sales were all over the place following release, but Rahimi shrugs off the reports of lower-than-expected sales. "Our marketing partners, way before the game came out, told us what the sales curve was going to be like," he explained. "It was going to be a nontraditional sales curve, there wasn't going to be a huge spike on week one and a drop off, instead there would be a ramp up, and hit a certain level, and then continue to sell at that level. That's what we're seeing; the game just keeps going and going and going."

In fact, there was no downtime for the team after the game's release. I asked when work began on the sequel. "A week before the game was released," Raimi said while chuckling. "The morale on the team was so high...everyone was so high on the game that as a producer, as a manager, I had a hard time getting them to stop working on the sequel." There was no breath of relief or vacation. "These guys immediately branched the code base and started running, it was a very natural and organic process."

What is Rahimi most looking forward to unleashing upon the public? The online mode. In this version of Boom Blox, players will be able to create their own levels and share them online, and the creation tools have been significantly upgraded from the past game. In fact, the levels you play in the game were created using the same tools given to gamers. "On the first game we were building the game and the Create Mode at the same time to ship the game, so our own designers didn't get to spend as much time with the Create Mode as we would have liked," he told Ars.

"As soon as we started the sequel we made a conscious decision that all of our designers' work would be expressed through the game's Create Mode; we dedicated an engineer just to support them, and build whatever tools necessary to make it as intuitive as possible."

This is in contrast to how most games operate: build the game and then the editing tools. The team behind Boom Blox Bash Party created the editing tools, and then simply used them to build the game. If the tools weren't up to the job, they were upgraded as they went.

The important thing is making sure the levels are worth playing—anyone who has spent time digging through the many layers of LittleBigPlanet know how many crappy levels there are out there. Not only will inappropriate content be removed, so will levels the moderation team sees as "trivial," as Rahimi explains it. Don't expect to randomly place a block here and there and then upload your level, in other words.

"The level sizes are so small, a few [kilobytes], so you can download a dozen levels in a second or two, and play them just as if they were on your disc, before you commit to saving them. You can then click to save on your Wii's flash memory, and that level becomes permanently yours until you choose to delete it." A five-star rating system will also let you rate your favorite maps or spread the word on bad ones.

Above all, Bash Party is a game that's comfortable on the system it's on. "I get this question so much, and honestly I'll give you the blunt answer: we really want the game to be as good as possible on the Wii," Rahimi told me when I asked about porting the title to other systems. "We don't have a second to think about other platforms. That ends up clouding your thinking and diluting the game experience. Boom Blox is a Wii game through and through. If we went on to another platform we'd have to significantly reconfigure and redesign the core mechanics, but currently we have no plans to do that."

The game should be available at retail by the time you read this, for $10 less than the first game. I asked Rahimi if work on the sequel began... well, a week ago. He laughed, saying, "No, this time around we do not currently have plans to work on the next iteration of Boom Blox." We are promised—or warned—to expect more games from the team.

Boom Blox Bash Party is shipping now, exclusively for the Nintendo Wii, for $39.99.

The first one is really good. I still haven't completed the multiplayer levels though. My wife insists that we keep trying the same level until we get the gold. Those jenga style levels are quite hard IMO, but it's ok. It's funny when you mess up all that structure with only one wrong move.

To anyone who hasn't played the original yet: What are you waiting for?

Absolutely a buy. I've had Wii-less friends invite me to parties requesting that I bring my Wii and specifically that I bring Boom Blox. This is one of those promised games where anyone, gamers and non-gamers alike can sit down and have fun with dead-simple, highly addictive mechanics.

Besides, blowing away a dancing cow with a bowling ball is just too cool not to buy this.